A real sense of place makes this recommended read almost as much fun as the Vineyard in July.
In this engrossing mashup of chick lit, mystery and romance, Hurley (The Prodigal, 2013, etc.) conjures up experiences that provoke three beautiful young women marred by failure and disappointment to question traditional values (church and family).
Once on Martha’s Vineyard, mystical, life-altering events (as well as sexual encounters) come to the three friends in rapid succession. Sweet, 32-year-old, suicidal Charlotte Harris arrives via ferry, and she carries an urn with her daughter’s ashes. She’s ostensibly there to indulge in a reunion with her old college pals, the glamorous sexpot Turner Graham and the single, athletic and free-spirited Dory Delano (who welcomes both as guests in her elegant Edgartown home). Dory immediately asks Charlotte (who is ready to slip off and kill herself) to find Enoch, a soft-spoken man known as “the fisherman.” When she accidentally hands him her suicide note instead of Dory’s shopping list, he reads it. His advice? Swim off Gay Head where currents are strongest. While readers may suspect Charlotte’s efforts to drown herself will fail, her implausible, nearly miraculous rescue, not to mention Dory’s own subsequent experience with the miraculous, and Enoch’s unselfish, peaceful behavior create a riptide of curiosity. While not philosophically deep, the novel is addictive, escapist reading that features stock figures such as Dory’s beau, Trafalgar “Tripp” Wallace the Third, who squanders his family’s old money, and Father Tommy Vecchio, who gives priests a bad name. Some facile generalizations about Roman Catholicism weaken the story, but clever biblical parallels and metaphors that run underneath the surface add intrigue. The skippable final chapters offer a secular explanation of Enoch, which seems unnecessary to all but the most literal-minded readers. Readers may want to stop reading after the deliriously satisfying conclusion and just enjoy a peek into the lives of the filthy rich.
A real sense of place makes this recommended read almost as much fun as the Vineyard in July.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0976127574
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ragbagger Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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